Household-based assessments for an equitable world: Framing the process and practice from East Africa

• In Event: Efficacy of household-based learning assessments in improving education for a more equitable world: lessons from East Africa

Proposal

Learning assessments have long been associated with schools as formal contexts where teaching and learning takes place. Arguments for school-based learning assessments are based on the cost effectiveness and readily available capacity amidst the prevalence of teachers. Furthermore, school- based assessments happen in contexts that allow for utility of the results that teachers can use for improving the teaching and learning process. However, household-based learning assessments have emerged from the last decade since the turn of the century.

Since 2005, one of the largest organisations in India began conducting an assessment to establish the learning levels of children in reading and numeracy using tests pegged on grade two curriculum. Unlike previous assessments that took place in the schools, the organisatoin conducted the assessments in households randomly sampled from selected villages across hundreds of districts in rural India. In addition, the organisation worked with citizen surveyors who had completed at least twelve years of continuous learning. In 2008, a team of educators from East Africa made a visit to India to understudy the innovative approach. The educators from Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania would adapt the learning assessment in East Africa. The assessments were conceptualised and coordinated by national civil society organisations in the respective countries. The process adapted and contextualised the process in India and involved four key processes; sampling, test development, training and actual assessment and the data management and reporting.

According to Mugo, Ruto, Nakabugo and Mgalla (2015), throughout the assessment, the assessments have retained distinct features of being undertaken at the household level, involving citizen surveyors known as volunteers, involving administering instant feedback, being age-specific and not grade-specific and data sets being open source once the reports are launched. In addition, the assessment reports do not generally include recommendations to trigger interventions initiated by the responsible stakeholders themselves. The reports involve use of social maths and simple statistics to report the findings from the assessments and make them comprehensible by a wide range of audiences. Furthermore, the assessments are implemented in partnership with local district-based organisations that recruit citizen enumerators and manage the assessment in their relevant sub-national units. The assessments of basic literacy and numeracy being household-based make it possible to assess children aged 4-16 years who are out of school and to compare their learning levels with those in school.

Furthermore, the household-based assessments include bonus questions that are not grade specific whose findings can be compared for the children in and out of school. This process is replicated in the initiative of assessing life skills and values implemented in Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania. The assessment is household-based and selects children to be assessed to be those aged 13-17 years on three life skills of collaboration, problem solving and self-awareness and the value of respect. To-date, approximately 40,000 adolescents have been assessed across the three countries. These assessments demonstrate that household-assessments can be used to assess equity in education as cross-border initiatives that make monitoring efforts possible.

Author

• Amos Kaburu, Royal Coffee House and Garden